Macleans.ca » londonhttp://www.macleans.ca
Canada's national weekly current affairs magazineSun, 02 Aug 2015 22:30:50 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2Have a romp through Princess Charlotte’s Londonhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/charlotte-london/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/charlotte-london/#commentsWed, 06 May 2015 18:15:53 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=714039London is a royal playground for both Prince George and new Princess Charlotte. Here's our interactive map of where they may roam.

]]>Most children have a playroom or a backyard to dream up games and imaginary friends. Princess George and Princess Charlotte? They get London. Patricia Treble highlights some hotspots where the royal siblings can learn, romp, and play.

Activate the interactive portrait by moving your mouse on top of it, or by tapping the image on mobile. For the best experience on mobile, flip your phone view to landscape mode.

Here’s more of Maclean’s in-depth coverage of the birth of the second royal baby:

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/charlotte-london/feed/0Wither Westminster: How do you fix a crumbling parliament?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/wither-westminster-how-do-you-fix-a-crumbling-parliament/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/wither-westminster-how-do-you-fix-a-crumbling-parliament/#commentsFri, 13 Mar 2015 13:22:52 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=691483Britain’s parliament building is a mess, and many politicians there wouldn’t have it any other way

London Bridge isn’t falling down, but the Palace of Westminster is another story. Last week in Britain, Speaker of the House John Bercow said in a speech to the Hansard Society that without a massive renovation, the neo-Gothic riverside pile will become uninhabitable within the next two decades. Or, as he rather more grandly put it, “It would be a huge pity if we decided that by the time we had reached the 200th anniversary of the vast fire which consumed the old Parliament and brought this one into being, we had to abandon this site and look elsewhere . . . Yet I will tell you in all candour that unless management of the very highest quality and a not inconsequential sum of public money are deployed on this estate over the next 10 years, that will be the outcome.”

It was not the need for restoration that surprised anyone, but the absolutely shocking price tag, which Bercow estimated to be somewhere around $5.7 billion. This announcement set off a debate in the British papers about what to do with Westminster, which has been a meeting place for the British Houses of Parliament (which today include the House of Commons and the House of Lords) since the 13th century.

According to a 2012 study by the Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal Group, the building is in dire need of refurbishment, a fact made evident by its crumbling stone facade and asbestos-stuffed walls. Situated on the Middlesex bank of the River Thames, it is also prone to flooding and leaks.

But all of this is now part of the building’s history and character—and, in some ways, a point of pride for many British politicians, a group that have an almost unnatural fondness for crumbling institutions and faded grandeur. In the recent BBC TV documentary Inside the Commons, Prime Minister David Cameron described Westminster affectionately as looking “half like a museum, half like a church and half like a school.” (An observation that only applies, if you happen to be a former classmate of Harry Potter or an old Etonian like Cameron.)

Anecdotes of decay have become part of the mythology of place. Last week in the Daily Telegraph, Tory MP Michael Fabricant reminisced about a meeting he’d hosted between MPs, members of the House of Lords, and members of the U.S. military. When screams broke out from the back of the room, he wrote, “I feared a jihadist attack. The admiral stopped speaking, and an embassy security man gave curt instructions into his wrist . . . and then all was revealed. Three little mice were scurrying around, enjoying the crumbs of our nibbles.”

Like most Britons, Fabricant would like to see Westminster properly restored. But this will be no easy task. It will almost certainly require both Houses to relocate for a few years during the renovation. The question of where has kicked off a heated debate of its own. Fabricant suggested Lichfield, a small city in Staffordshire, which “was once the ecclesiastical capital of Mercia,” and also happens to be smack in the centre of the country—and in his own constituency. Others have suggested that the decaying building should be turned into a museum, and another city should become the U.K. capital, vaulting the country into a brave new age of North American-style devolution. Writing for the Independent, columnist Matthew Norman suggested building a brand-new parliament somewhere in the rural and rainy northeast. The idea, he suggested, was to follow the North American model of choosing a capital with a climate and landscape “inhospitable enough to force representatives to spend as little time there as possible, and as much in their home states among the people who elected them.”

Cheeky as the debate might seem, there are serious impracticalities to staying in Westminster beyond the leaky roof. The Commons is so cramped, it can only seat 427 of Britain’s 650 sitting MPs. At the weekly prime minister’s questions, many MPs end up shouting at each other while standing at either end of the gallery. In 1941, the chamber was destroyed during the Blitz, and some argued it should be reconfigured to give MPs more breathing space. The debate raged on, but in the end, prime minister Winston Churchill put an end to it by arguing that the Victorian chamber be replicated to preserve the “intimacy and theatre,” as well as a link to history.

Bercow, in his speech, said he agreed with Churchill. “This is a fabulous institution located in awesome surroundings,” he concluded. “It will require bold and imaginative managerial leadership to ensure that we are a parliament fit for purpose, and that this Victorian legacy can be rendered practical for contemporary representation.” Which is a fancy way of saying it’s time for a makeover; let’s hope we can afford it.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrive on Thursday to officially reopen Canada House in London following an extensive programme of restoration and refurbishment. Canada House is the official home to the Canadian High Commission in the United Kingdom. The building was first opened in 1925 by King George V. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/Getty Images)

For decades, Canada House has been a dreary, dirty diplomatic representation of Canada in London. Faded flags hung lifeless from its grimy facade. It was an embarrassment, for the high commission building isn’t tucked away in a suburb, but occupies one of the best locations in London—Trafalgar Square. Tourists would look around the square, admiring the unified 1820s architecture of the area, especially the National Gallery, then skip over Canada House.

Now, finally, it’s been spit-and-polished clean. It comes after a big reordering of Canada’s diplomatic corps in the city. The building in Grosvenor Square was sold for around $600 million, another building was bought close to Canada House, and everything was gussied up. In December, staff moved back into Canada House, marking the first time in more than 50 years that all the diplomats are under one roof.

And now, 90 years after her grandparents, George V and Queen Mary, first opened Canada House in 1925, the current sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II, has come to Trafalgar Square to reopen the renovated building. Sure, she got stuck in a traffic jam on her way to the building, but, once there, it was all business as usual. There were Mounties everywhere, including a few on horseback, as well as a flotilla of politicians and diplomats. Knowing Canada’s love of all things red, she wore blue, so as to not vanish into the background of red serge. And of course, she got an obligatory gift: a gold key, similar to one given to her grandparents.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/who-to-invite-to-re-open-a-high-commission-the-queen-of-course/feed/0Two Ontario patients being tested for Ebola placed in isolationhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/two-ontario-patients-being-tested-for-ebola-placed-in-isolation/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/two-ontario-patients-being-tested-for-ebola-placed-in-isolation/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 08:54:12 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=678079The London, Ont. hospital has not released the names of the two patients and says there is no impact on patient or visitor activity

“The last time we did this, one woman walked in looking for a pair of tights, and walked out a couple of hours later with a luxury condo!” says Nicola Clark, the chipper, besuited marketing manager for Harrods Estates, the real estate arm of London’s most famous department store. She’s standing in the northwest corner of the retail monolith, inside a new pop-up shop devoted to high-end real estate. The space is expensively carpeted and lit with an enormous glittering chandelier. There are two comfy chairs for viewing homes through virtual-reality goggles, and a large turquoise velvet sofa for lounging.

It’s the third time in several years Harrods has attempted such a venture, and the first time for London real estate (the other two shops sold holiday apartments in the Bahamas and Dubai). Young, hyper-groomed sales associates stand around smiling at the river of shoppers. A group of women in hijabs wander by, Gucci and Louis Vuitton logos decorating otherwise modest headscarves. After them, a bus tour of noisy Chinese tourists. And then there are the native west Londoners, up from the countryside in their tweed coats and Wellie boots—another delegation in Harrods’s UN assembly of super-rich consumers.

The area occupied by the pop-up is normally devoted to the dress designer Valentino. But the fancy frocks have been turfed out for now, and the Manhattan Loft Corporation has taken over the space. It’s a temporary setup—a joint venture between the developer and Harrods Estates—designed to offer high-net-worth customers a little more with their shopping experience. Manhattan Lofts has even created Oculus Rift virtual-reality goggles, used by video game aficionados, for viewing the not-yet-built apartments. The experience gives prospective buyers the sensation of having walked around a condo before it’s built. (The project breaks ground next month and will be completed by 2018.)

In London, the idea of selling luxury apartments in a department store is not as crazy as it sounds. Harrods Estates has been doing just that for over a century, in fact—albeit discreetly. (They started in the store’s basement and now have their own stand-alone shopfront down the road.) If, after buying a $38,000 Cartier tennis bracelet and a $132,000 Fendi fur coat, you don’t feel sufficiently indulged, why not chuck a $4-million pied-à-terre in the cart, too?

According to Ray Smith, the twinkly Irish director of sales for Manhattan Lofts, most serious buyers who wander into the shop are already well-educated in the London property market. “We get a mixture of people,” he says, waving at the gleaming model high-rise with two-bedroom toy apartment, complete with designer dolls’ furniture. “Some are buying as owner occupiers and, for many others, it’s an overseas investment. We’ve had a lot of overseas buyers looking to purchase a property for their children to live in when they go to university in London.”

Manhattan Lofts has an impeccable reputation, having developed two highly successful London projects in recent years: the hotel and apartments at St. Pancras, and the Chiltern Firehouse hotel and restaurant—currently the hottest nightspot in London and so crammed with celebrities, a living wall of paparazzi has permanently erected itself outside the front doors. The new building, a 42-storey hotel-condo project with two cantilevered floors and three roof gardens, is located in the heart of regenerated east London. The 80-hectare Queen Elizabeth Park surrounds it. Apartments start at just over $1 million and run as high as $9 million for a penthouse.

According to Smith, the pop-up shop has been a success. Several sales are currently in the paperwork stage (he won’t be more specific). Part of the idea behind the collaboration, he admits, is publicity, plain and simple. “Yes, of course, we want to sell apartments,” he says, “but it’s also fantastically profile-raising just to be here.”

Asked if any of his buyers came in looking for a handbag and walked out with a piece of east London, he laughs. “People in London have been impulse-buying property for years,” he says. “We’re just making it easier for them.”tweet this

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/why-a-high-end-london-department-store-is-moving-into-real-estate/feed/0Matt Brown to replace disgraced former London mayor Joe Fontanahttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/matt-brown-to-replace-disgraced-former-london-mayor-joe-fontana/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/matt-brown-to-replace-disgraced-former-london-mayor-joe-fontana/#commentsTue, 28 Oct 2014 01:43:50 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=630891Brown, a teacher, beats out more than a dozen candidates

The Delgarno Gardens housing estate is located in Ladbroke Grove, a neighbourhood at the north end of London’s swankiest district, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and just a stone’s throw from the Michelin-starred restaurants of Notting Hill. Strolling around these streets on a sunny afternoon last week, it seems scarcely believable that this idyllic example of Britain’s social welfare state is also one of the country’s worst breeding grounds for Islamic extremism.

And yet, in the past decade, more than a dozen young men from this neighbourhood have been implicated in or convicted of acts of terrorism, leaving many local residents to wonder how and why.

Though technically a public housing project, the Dalgarno estate feels about as far from “ghetto” as one could imagine: several blocks of tidy 1930s brick row houses are fronted by well-maintained gardens. The local park is bursting with cheerful children. There are community centres and well-maintained community billboards with notices advertising everything from free daycare to community choirs and a “conversation and question time” with the local city councillor.

London is a city in which the super-rich and powerful live cheek by jowl with the poor and new immigrants, and this is certainly true of this corner of Ladbroke Grove. Before Prime Minister David Cameron moved into 10 Downing Street, he and his family lived just down the road. His chief whip, Michael Gove, and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, also own homes nearby.

But residents here were surprised last week when Dalgarno Gardens resident Tarik Hassane was arrested on terrorism charges in what is being reported as the first Islamic State-supported London bombing plot. An aspiring doctor who travelled to Sudan to study medicine after failing to get into med school at King’s College London, Hassane was born in London. His Twitter profile reveals a young man equally fanatical about football as he is with his deepening faith. When two members of Ladbroke Grove’s North African community died fighting in Syria last year, he tweeted eulogies praising their bravery. Analysts at the King’s International Centre of the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence said Hassane had been exchanging messages with British jihadists in Syria for months. And neighbours reported he travelled to Syria and Sudan in the past year and returned “increasingly serious” about his faith.

It’s not the first high-profile terrorism arrest in the area. In 2005, two other residents, Muktar Said Ibrahim and Ramzi Mohammed, were hunted down here by police. The two were later convicted of conspiracy in the 2005 London Underground bombings. (They had carried backpacks of explosives onto the subway system.) There have also been several terror convictions for various worshippers at the nearby Al Manaar cultural heritage centre and mosque in Westbourne Park, as well as a handful of other reported local defections to join the war in Syria.

The strange thing is that, like the surrounding area itself, the Al Manaar mosque does not have a reputation for religious extremism or cultural isolation. In fact, Ramzi Mohammed was kicked out of the congregation for his fanatical views prior to his arrest.

Walking around Dalgarno Gardens, the residents appear to be ethnically mixed. There are as many head scarves as there are ball caps, and children of all backgrounds play together in the local, government-subsidized preschool. Sarah, a local resident who was pushing her infant son in a stroller and did not want her last name used, said she knows several neighbours of Hassane’s who were baffled by the charges against him. “People here just couldn’t believe he’d done anything like that. This is a nice area; it’s not like people are desperate or angry at the system or anything like that.”

But, evidently, some are—and the reasons why seem to cut across both class and culture. It is a mistake to think that the British Muslim youth who’ve left to fight in Syria (about 500 so far) have done so because of poverty or desperation. On the contrary, most are middle-class, educated young men of moderate religious backgrounds. Their privilege, many experts believe, is the very thing that drives them into the arms of extremism. They cleave, for better or worse, to the jihadist dream that Islam will once again rise up and rule the world.

Another of the young men arrested in the alleged Islamic State-supported bomb plot was Gusai Abuzeid, a young man of Iraqi-Kurdish descent who had also attended Westminster City School—a Christian faith school near the Houses of Parliament in central London. Like many of those arrested in Ladbroke Grove, Abuzeid was reportedly far from radical in his habits. As his brother, Adai, told the Daily Mail, “He smokes, he drinks, he has a girlfriend. If anything, he’s not a real Muslim. He doesn’t pray. He’s not political, either. Our whole family is against what is going on out there.”

In a society as wildly diverse as London, it seems that radical extremism can flourish almost anywhere—including on the (not-so) mean streets of Ladbroke Grove.

'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red', a major sculpture marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, 888,246 ceramic poppies will progressively fill the Tower of London's famous moat. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper. Camera Press/Redux

For nearly 1,000 years, the Tower of London has been a hulking fortress and prison on the bank of the Thames River. Anne Boleyn was beheaded on Tower Green and Nazi Rudolf Hess was imprisoned there during the Second World War, while the tower’s treasures, including the Crown jewels, are guarded by a permanent military detachment. Now its formidable defences are being transformed by a dramatic art installation.

For almost four months, five days a week, hundreds of volunteers have been planting thousands of ceramic poppies in drifts across the tower’s deep, grass-covered moat. Swaths of the metal-stemmed flowers seem to flow down from the thick walls, while others soar on a wave high above a bridge. Started on June 17, it will be completed on Nov. 11, Remembrance Day, when exactly 888,246 poppies will fill the moat—one for each British and Commonwealth fatality of the First World War. The installation’s mammoth scale echoes and honours the war’s enormous toll.

It’s not the first large-scale event put on by Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), the independent charity that runs Britain’s unoccupied royal palaces. At Kensington Palace, artists, including designer Vivienne Westwood, have created wildly contemporary installations. Yet the poppies have captured people’s interest like no other, says HRP’s Polly Richards. Thousands regularly come to see the planting, as well as the evening Roll of Honour, when 200 names of the dead, put forward by the public, are read from within the moat.

Even the tower’s famous yeoman warders—commonly known as Beefeaters—are in awe. “I get goose pimples every time I walk by it,” says Jim Duncan, the effort’s production manager. “If there is a bit of a wind going, you hear the tinkling of the poppies as they touch each other. Each poppy represents the life of a fallen soldier. To see them move, it’s a bit like reveille in the morning—someone is waking them up.”

The installation is the creation of Paul Cummins, a Derbyshire-based artist known for creating large ceramic floral displays. He was inspired by a line in a will of an unidentified local man who died during the war. Describing the battlefields, the soldier wrote, “The blood-swept lands and seas of red, where angels fear to tread.” That first clause is now the title of the installation.

As for the location, the Tower of London’s moat was the only spot that would feasibly, and safely, handle such slow-growing, delicate art on such a massive scale. Its fortifications mean the public can see the poppies, but can’t get near them. In 1914, the moat was also a training ground for eager military volunteers.

The poppies themselves are modelled on Papaver rhoeas, the flouncy poppy of Flanders Fields, where Col. John McCrae wrote his famous poem. Cummins’s instructions to the three British potteries turning his vision into ceramics were simple: Each flower had to be handmade and unique. But his idea would have remained on paper without a 20,000-strong army of volunteers from as far away as Vietnam and Brazil pouring into the tower. On Sept. 6, it was the turn of Caroline Auckland, a writer and photographer from Kent, whose team of 200 volunteers assembled and planted 7,000 poppies. Like many, she lost relatives in the war. So, as she gently tapped poppies into the grounds, Auckland whispered, “This is for you.”

Every few days stage designer Tom Piper charts out a new edge for the poppies so the installation always has a flowing, watery look, explains Richards. Within that stricture, volunteers do what they want. “They aren’t firmly directed at how to plant,” she says. “They have to look at what’s been done before to get their feel of what height of poppy to use to make it feel natural.”

After Nov. 11, volunteers will re-enter the moat to pack up the poppies, which are being sold online for $45 each. (More than 550,000 have been sold, with part of the proceeds going to six military-related charities.) Auckland will help, having found her first stint profoundly moving. She recalls seeing one or two poppies that had fallen over. “You think ‘it doesn’t matter,’ but it does. It’s all about the fallen.”

]]>LONDON, Ont. — London, Ont., Mayor Joe Fontana says in retrospect it was “stupid” of him to alter a document he submitted for expenses while he was a Liberal member of Parliament, but insists it was no forgery.

Fontana took the stand Wednesday in his own defence after pleading not guilty to fraud, breach of trust and uttering forged documents from his time as a cabinet minister.

He admitted making seven changes — including whiting out his wife’s signature and replacing it with his own — to an existing contract for a hall rental for his son’s 2005 wedding to reflect an event he planned for then-finance minister Ralph Goodale at the same venue.

Other alterations on the contract were changing the date of the event from June 25, 2005 to Feb. 25, 2004, the word “wedding” to “reception” and the addition of a yellow sticky note saying “misc constituents reception.”

The event didn’t end up going ahead at the Marconi Club, but Fontana believed the club was owed a $1,700 deposit from his MP budget. Since he had only spoken with the club’s president over the phone and didn’t have any paperwork, Fontana changed several details on the wedding contract from a few months prior and submitted it, he testified.

One of the changes was to write the word original in quotation marks at the top of the document.

“I took a document that I thought was null and void…put ‘original’ there so it wouldn’t be confused with anything else,” Fontana said.

During a testy cross-examination, Fontana used various terms to describe what he did to the contract — modified, changed, altered, and his most common refrain, that he just created a new document — but he bristled at Crown attorney Timothy Zuber’s suggestion that it was a forgery.

“Yeah, excuse me?” Fontana said after his lawyer objected. “Dumb, stupid, yes. I was busy, it was available…Things were harried at the time in Ottawa — a minority government.”

Zuber asked Fontana why he wouldn’t have just gone to the Marconi Club and asked for an invoice that he could submit.

“I submitted that document as proof,” Fontana replied.

Zuber wondered if there were any other occasions in which third-party service providers for MP functions didn’t provide him with a bill.

“Well no, because they wouldn’t be paid,” Fontana said.

“My point exactly,” Zuber replied.

Since the Marconi Club never sent Fontana or the government a bill, Zuber suggested that meant they didn’t expect to be paid. Fontana suggested he took it upon himself to see that they be paid a deposit — he decided to use the same amount as he deposited for his son’s wedding — for reserving the hall.

“They held their hall for me on a Friday night and therefore they couldn’t use it for anything else,” he testified. “Therefore I felt obligated to pay them for the use of that hall.”

As the current mayor of London — Fontana has refused to step down — would Fontana stop doing business with someone if he got wind they were submitted altered documents, Zuber wondered.

“Probably,” Fontana replied.

Closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday, and Ontario Superior Court Judge Bruce Thomas asked the lawyers to address in their submissions, if he is to accept the defence theory, “Did Mr. Fontana nonetheless commit an offence as set out in count 3 (forgery)?”

The Crown said that a $1,700 Government of Canada cheque was ultimately sent to the Marconi Club, where it was listed on their books as payment for Fontana’s son’s wedding.

The court has heard conflicting evidence about whether government officials had been instructed to reimburse Fontana or the Marconi Club the $1,700. Fontana insisted it was intended for the club, but the Crown suggested otherwise.

Zuber suggested that Fontana didn’t intend for the Marconi Club to put the money toward his son’s wedding, but that the cheque was supposed to be sent to him to “line your pockets with $1,700 cash.” Fontana disagreed.

The president of the Marconi Club at the time testified Wednesday that he explained to the general manager that the government cheque was for a cancelled reception, but the general manager testified he did not recall that conversation.

Here’s a game no one wants to play at home: Pretend to be François Hollande.

The French president is beset with a host of crippling problems, ranging from the personal to the political to the economic. Taken together, his challenges present a significant threat to France, and beyond.

Hollande’s messy private life has been generating plenty of salacious interest. While unmarried, the president installed his live-in partner, Valérie Trierweiler, as the country’s “first lady,” with an office and staff at the Elysée Palace. Now, however, revelations of his midnight visits with Julie Gayet, a French actress, appear to have severed his official relationship with Trierweiler, who wound up in the hospital from the stress.

Of course, infidelity need not be fatal to a politician’s career, especially in France. But the fallout from the affair has made Hollande look weak and foolish. (He was photographed riding to his trysts on the back of a scooter, wearing an enormous helmet and with little security in evidence.) All this has contributed to a free fall in his political popularity. Current opinion polls put his support at 15 to 20 per cent, the lowest recorded for a president since the founding of France’s Fifth Republic in 1958.

And yet, Hollande’s most pressing problems aren’t on the front pages of the tabloids. It’s the business section that’s giving him the biggest headaches.

Across most of Europe, the economic news has been slowly but steadily improving. The five sick men of Europe—Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain—are getting back on their feet, as government austerity, tax reform and measures to improve labour-market flexibility start to pay off. In December, for example, Ireland became the first of the five to emerge from the continent’s massive bank bailout program.

Unfortunately, as the sick men heal themselves, France appears to be heading in the opposite direction, due to a bloated public sector, high taxes and the famously rigid French labour market. Unemployment is now at a 16-year high, government spending accounts for an unsustainable 57 per cent of GDP, and last month’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) survey, a key indicator of private sector expectations, suggests France may be entering yet another recession—its fourth in six years. According to Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, which conducts the PMI survey, “France looks increasingly like the new ‘sick man of Europe.’ ”

One example of many reveals how the French combination of union intransigence and government regulation frustrates efforts at economic progress or renewal: A smartphone app that would allow Parisians to quickly order a private cab was recently saddled with a government decree imposing a 15-minute wait time on orders, so as to give unionized, roaming cabbies a chance to snap up the fare. Then, earlier this month, the union rioted to press demands that the government lengthen the mandated delay to half an hour. Business in France is increasingly at odds with the expectations of efficiency and customer service in the rest of the modern, global economy.

Even more troubling, young entrepreneurial talent is escaping to London, a short train ride away, where an estimated 400,000 French émigrés now live and work. A recent British academic study of these highly skilled migrants concludes that “most . . . have no plan to return to work in France.”

The marked divergence in economic activity and confidence between France and the rest of Europe has forced Hollande to take action. At the beginning of January, just as the details of his sex life were getting a full airing, the president announced a multi-year, $45-billion tax concession for employers. He also promised to cut public spending, saying the state has become “too heavy, too slow, too costly.”

All this sounds like the medicine France needs. But can Hollande really deliver on such reforms? The socialist leader won the presidency in 2012 with a platform of higher taxes for the rich—including a 75 per cent impost on high earners—and a reversal in earlier austerity measures. Now he’s trying to remake himself into a fiscal conservative. It seems a big ask, particularly given his slumping popularity, lack of political capital and that famous French resistance to economic change. A rapid turnaround seems no more likely than a reconciliation with Trierweiler.

It bears mention, of course, that France remains a significant First World power with a large and diversified economy. And its crucial alliance with Germany is still intact. Nevertheless, there exists a real risk that continued economic malaise and/or the inevitable street protests in reaction to any reform efforts could lead to a dramatic collapse in Europe’s second-largest economy; and such an event would wipe out all the hard-won progress to date by the continent’s other weak nations.

The fall of France could easily precipitate another international financial calamity. And no one wants that.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/editorial-the-real-scandal-is-frances-financial-ruin/feed/63Ambitious plans to remember WWI could strain a troubled European Unionhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/ambitious-plans-to-remember-wwi-could-strain-a-troubled-european-union/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/ambitious-plans-to-remember-wwi-could-strain-a-troubled-european-union/#commentsMon, 20 Jan 2014 15:02:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=455300Things are far from quiet on the Western Front

Next December, a team of Britons and a team of Germans will play soccer on a historic field in Flanders. The game will mark 100 years since the First World War’s “Christmas truce,” in which British and German soldiers, squaring off on the Western Front, declared a temporary ceasefire: shuffling out of their trenches to sing holiday carols, retrieve and bury the dead, exchange cigarettes, and kick around some soccer balls.

By Christmas 2014, the Great War’s centenary celebrations will be well under way. Indeed, the war that was supposed to end all wars will be tough to avoid. In many countries, tens of millions of dollars have been pledged—and four years of wall-to-wall commemorating has been arranged. But exactly how (and how much) should we remember?

It won’t all be as cheery as a soccer game—especially in Europe, where former battlefield enemies are now joined in a rather troubled European Union. In August, relations between Britain and Germany turned sour when it was revealed that Berlin had sent a special envoy to London to discuss the centenary—and reportedly asked Britain to tone down its commemorations. Britain should strike a “less declamatory tone,” urged Norman Walter, of the German embassy in London. “We [in Germany] would prefer not to have any celebrations, having lost. Our feeling is that issues about who was guilty and all that should be left more or less to historians.”

Britain’s centenary plans have been years in the making, and are particularly ambitious. In an October 2012 speech, British Prime Minister David Cameron unveiled a new centenary website and a new centenary logo—and announced that London’s Imperial War Museum, with $60 million of government financing, would lead a network of more than 1,000 centenary-focused organizations. “There is something about the First World War that makes it a fundamental part of our national consciousness,” said Cameron. “I feel it very deeply.” Over the next few months, local groups announced a variety of projects: ship refurbishments, memorial plaques and gardens of poppies. The BBC announced 2,500 hours of related programming. Before long, critics were accusing Cameron’s government of turning the centenary into a “celebration of war.” In a scathing editorial, the Guardian urged the PM not to “wrap himself in the flag.”

At the same time, those on the right have accused Cameron of not celebrating enough. An article in the right-leaning Telegraph quoted historians who say that Cameron’s centenary “focuses on British defeats”: marking carnage-filled campaigns like the Battle of Somme, but ignoring the victories of 1918’s Hundred-Days Offensive. Oxford University professor Hew Strachan, who sits on Britain’s centenary planning committee, has charged the government with striking too subdued a tone. “There are causes for celebration, too,” cautions Strachan. But “we find it very difficult to elevate our gaze from our parochial preoccupations with the mud of the Western Front.”

Much of the conflict can be traced to European Union fissures. With respect to the centenary, Euroskeptical Britain has largely kept to itself—promoting joint Commonwealth events. France, eager to assert its place in the Union, has sought out opportunities for Franco-German collaboration. In Germany, the EU’s most forceful supporter of fiscal union, the 2014 lead-up has been more muted. Germans “don’t want to appear, given the political situation in Europe, to be beating their chests and saying ‘Oh, what a glorious past we had!’ ” historian Margaret MacMillan recently told Maclean’s.

Other countries will have their own centenary complications. In Belgium, Flemish nationalists will use the centenary to draw attention to their independence claims. In 2015, Turkey will face the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, which it still denies ever happened. Italy is reportedly fretting that its wartime sacrifices will be overlooked. Russian MPs would like the centenary to “raise patriotism in young people.” And Australian critics will continue to charge that their government’s $135-million centenary expenditure is grossly excessive. (Canada has budgeted $5 million to build a visitor centre at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.)

Belgium—where so much of the First World War’s fighting took place—is preparing for a deluge of tourists. The Flanders Fields Museum has been renovated. A new building has been constructed at the Passchendaele memorial. Broken headstones at the Tyne Cot war cemetery are being replaced. And Flanders’ tourism chiefs are trying to create accommodation space for some half a million commemorators. One hundred years later, things are far from quiet on the Western Front.

Passengers on the slow train from Manchester to Liverpool sit staring out the windows at the drizzle-soaked urban sprawl—just a regular Monday commute across one of Britain’s poorest regions. But like so many things in the proud and beleaguered north, this storied route was once a symbol of human invention and the British Empire’s dominance. Nearly 200 years ago, the Liverpool-to-Manchester Railway was the world’s first twin-track intercity passenger railway—a line that connected the great manufacturing mills of Manchester and the county of Lancashire with the great Port of Liverpool—then the world’s biggest and busiest industrial port.

Today, the north of England is struggling. This, in itself, is hardly new. Industrial decline and urban deprivation have defined the modern north as much as the Beatles and Premier League football. For as long as most people here can remember, their cities have been trying and failing to keep up economically with the country’s robust southeast, which includes the powerhouse of London and the affluent home counties. But even now that the recession has lifted, this historical divide is getting worse, not better. Despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s election pledge to unite the country and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s austerity declaration that “we are all in this together,” the north has never seemed so alienated from the rest of Britain.

While London’s economy has bounded back and its real estate market has soared since the 2007 banking crash, the north and everywhere else (with the exception of the southeast, which includes London) are still lagging. The Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at Manchester University recently reported that the U.K.’s southeast, home to just a quarter of the population, was responsible for 37 per cent of the nation’s growth from 1997 to 2006. Since then, that number has shot up to 48 per cent. Meanwhile, the rest of Britain (with the exception of Scotland, which has its own devolved system of government) has experienced a period of decline marked by high unemployment and severe public-spending cuts. This widening chasm has caused great alarm among economists, who warn that Britain risks an Italian-style economic imbalance (in which one half of the country pulls the other).

And it’s not just about money. The divide between London rich and regional poor (which speaks directly to the country’s increasingly squeezed middle class) has caused a great deal of commentary of late. The New Statesman recently published a special northern-themed issue, and two of last year’s most celebrated books—Autobiography by the Smiths’ frontman Morrissey, about his childhood growing up in Manchester, and Paul Morley’s whimsical memoir and regional history, The North (and Almost Everything in It)—proved the country is still fascinated by this beleaguered region.

The truth is, the north has long been disproportionately culturally productive—from bands like the Beatles and Joy Division to the novels and plays of Alan Bennett—and England has long looked there for a cultural sense of itself. This region of distinctive accents, hardscrabble pluck and a glorious industrial past is, in many ways, an embodiment of old-fashioned British values: hard work, modesty and humour in the face of adversity. And in a country not known for its cuddliness, the north is surprisingly friendly. Everyone from the taxi driver to the tea shop lady will call you “love” and actually seem to mean it.

But that has not helped prevent its decline. The root of the problem, according to the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, is Britain’s centralized government, which maintains an iron grip over regional spending. In Liverpool, 76 per cent of the city’s funding comes from the central government, half of which will be cut by 2017. The reason Liverpool has been so badly hit is in part also due to the declining value of property in the city. While property values in London have gone up approximately 10 per cent per year for some time now, values in Liverpool and Manchester have dropped significantly since 2007. Council tax (or property tax)—the only local tax revenue that cities retain—is based on land value. And with over 60 per cent of Liverpudlians in the lowest council tax bracket (compared to just 18 per cent of Londoners) that revenue has been sorely depleted.

Northern economies are also more dependent on the public sector for benefits. The north has higher levels of poor health, unemployment and pensioners than the rest of the country. In the Liverpool region today, roughly one in five people is on benefits.

“It’s the economics of the madhouse,” says Anderson. An expansive fellow, bald as a cue ball with dancing blue eyes, he is not afraid to speak frankly. “There’s no question in my mind that this has been an ideological attack on local government. We’re the worst off and we’re also the worst hit. So when they say down in Westminster, ‘We’re all in this together,’ that’s absolute rubbish.” What he stops just short of saying is that the north has been hung out to dry for political reasons. The opposition Labour Party dominates in this part of the world and has since the Thatcher era.

Richard Leese, leader of the Manchester city council, expresses similar outrage over the way the coalition government has targeted his city. Though he’s quick to point out that Manchester is the relative success story of the region—both its economy and population are growing—he says gains have been made despite the central government rather than because of it. Manchester’s council funding has been cut by 40 per cent over the past five years, despite the region’s higher levels of deprivation. Leese also says he has been “personally attacked” by Prime Minister Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg for daring to complain about unfair treatment. “They’ve simply funnelled money away from the country’s poorest people and into their political heartland. There is no ‘rebalancing’ going on whatsoever, you can be sure of that.”

There are some signs of regeneration in the urban northwest—from Manchester’s lively restaurant and bar scene to Liverpool’s revitalized waterfront, which includes a branch of the Tate. But leave the gleaming, bustling downtown cores and it’s impossible to ignore the scenes of startling poverty.

Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, home of Liverpool Football Club, is a symbol of international wealth in one of the city’s most rundown neighbourhoods. For blocks around the stadium there is little but boarded-up Victorian terraced houses. Some houses have been razed, but plans to rebuild the area are in limbo. As Matt Biagetti, an urban planner from the organization Liverpool Vision, says, “These are areas where no one is choosing to be. And no one knows what to do with them.”

No one except perhaps the people at Homebaked, a small, community-run café that sits across from Anfield. Serving homemade scones and tea, the waitress, a local volunteer, recounts how she and her friends took over the vacant space and raised $33,000 on Kickstarter for an oven. They’ve been open for eight weeks, servicing the otherwise desolate neighbourhood and providing cooking skills in exchange for volunteer labour. It’s this sort of community enterprise that the Tory-led coalition was hoping might spring up to fill the gap left by public-sector cuts. But asked what their long-term plans are, the waitress laughs and shakes her head. “Eventually the landlords will sell up to the football club and they’ll tear us down. But what do you expect, really?” And then she refills the hot water in my teapot and gives me an extra scone for the road.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/while-london-thrives-the-gritty-north-struggles-alienated-and-angry/feed/2London Mayor Joe Fontana’s trial on fraud charges set to begin May 26http://www.macleans.ca/general/london-mayor-joe-fontanas-trial-on-fraud-charges-set-to-begin-may-26/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/london-mayor-joe-fontanas-trial-on-fraud-charges-set-to-begin-may-26/#commentsTue, 10 Dec 2013 17:07:10 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=447627LONDON, Ont. – The mayor of London, Ont., will be going to trial on fraud charges this spring.
A date of May 26 has been set for the trial of…

Strolling through Holland Park, my west London neighbourhood, it’s pretty unusual to run into any neighbours. There are people, of course—this is London, one of the most heavily populated cities in the world—but the ones I usually see are not the people who own, or even rent, the houses around my small flat. Rather, they are the staff of the people who own the houses: servants washing cars, servants walking dogs, servants operating leaf blowers that would surely cause noise complaints, were there any neighbours around to make them. There are Polish builders and Spanish gardeners and Filipina housekeepers in white aprons and floppy cotton caps right out of Downton Abbey. The grand bay windows they are forever polishing tend to be shuttered from the inside out. That’s because many (if not most) of the neighbours who live in my neighbourhood don’t actually live here at all. They are what’s called, in London parlance, “non-doms”—non-domiciled residents—and they are buying up the city, one mansion-block full of $15-million flats at a time.

Peter Young at the high-end John D. Wood & Co. estate agency, said that 60 to 70 per cent of buyers in the city’s tony locations of Kensington and Chelsea were from overseas.

For investment and tax reasons, the U.K.’s non-doms funnel their cash into the so-called “land bank” of London real estate, and spend the rest of the year floating between houses and yachts in places like Palm Beach, San Tropez, St. Barts, Monaco and Moscow—the social axis of the global super-rich.

Foreign money is nothing new to London—for decades now, the capital has depended on an influx of Middle Eastern oil cash and spendthrift American and European bankers to keep sales of crocodile clutches humming at Harrods—but in recent years, things have taken a turn for the surreal.

While prices of luxury properties in the rest of the U.K. have dipped in the last year, in upmarket London neighbourhoods like Mayfair, Kensington and Belgravia, property is booming. In August, Savills, one of London’s poshest estate agencies, reported that the average sale price for its homes rose 18 per cent in 2013 to $5.1 million and, as of the first six months of this year, the company’s pre-tax profits were up 25 per cent. It’s not simply a bubble, but a state of affairs that recently prompted high-end real estate expert Henry Pryor to declare that the London market had “completely lost touch with reality.” And make no mistake: The non-doms are driving the madness. As Debra Stroud, sales director at Chesterton Humberts in Knightsbridge, recently told the Guardian’s real estate section, her clients are mostly “international buyers looking for good two- to three-beds. The majority of them will use it just a few months a year, and they want to be able to step out into the shops and restaurants.”

In other words, for the global super-rich, buying a several-million-pound residence in London is a cheaper, homier alternative to a suite at the Dorchester—and a better investment, too.

A British finance worker employed by a private Swiss bank recently told me at a London dinner party that he spends “at least half” his working life “buying up London real estate for Russian clients, simply as a place to park their money.” Clients, he added, who don’t pay taxes in the U.K. In Britain, those who live in the country for fewer than 183 days are not liable for U.K. tax on their worldwide capital gains. And, unlike many countries, Britain does not have legal restrictions on overseas investors owning property. Moreover, properties are taxed largely according to the number of adult residents, rather than by market-value assessment—so a $100-million Belgravia manse might only pay a tad more in municipal taxes than a tiny bachelor in a walk-up building.

So what does this mean for the people who actually live in this city? Well, for people with families and jobs and net worths well under seven figures (people, in other words, like this columnist), it’s not good news.

Local services like state schools and libraries are essentially ignored by non-dom residents, who have no real stake in their community, given that they don’t actually live there. And independent businesses are suffering across London from the lack of local patronage. “Three years ago, I had people ordering cases,” says Jean Luc Menard, a wine-shop owner in west London who was glumly presiding over a going-out-of-business sale last week. “Now, I guess rich people import their own wine from abroad. Or they bring it in with them. In any case, they don’t buy it here.”

Increasingly, in London neighbourhoods like mine, the people who do actually live here feel resentful—and baffled—by the lives of our invisible super-rich neighbours. Last week, the tabloids reported on a drinking game that had broken out after midnight at the Russian-themed nightclub, Kitsch. According to the story, two young Russian millionaires (and their scantily clad female entourages) had competed to see how many champagne cocktails they could drink over the course of three hours. Glancing at the headline, the shopkeeper in my local newsagent just shook his head. “Over £130,000 bar bill,” he said ruefully. “They could have bought a studio flat for that.”

When members of Western’s cheerleading team launched a member into the air on their way to the football game this weekend against Queen’s, their attempt to boost school spirit during homecoming was rewarded with a $140 fine. London Police deemed the demonstration “a nuisance” and ticketed head cheerleader Max Gow.

The team’s coach told the London Free Press he and Gow plan to fight the ticket. That won’t surprise anyone. What will is that this fine was just one of 270 issued during Saturday’s celebration. The number might seem high to outsiders but students here are used to the annual ticketing blitz know as “Project LEARN” (Liquor Enforcement and Reduction of Noise), when party, noise and litter bylaws are strictly enforced for the first month of classes. Many students, myself included, think the campaign targets us unfairly.

Normally, if the music from a house party is too loud, a neighbour will call and request police intervention. During Project LEARN, police patrol student residential areas sniffing out noisy parties that nobody complains about. Western’s University Students’ Council is looking for alternative.

Project LEARN assumes that all students lose control, causing harm to ourselves and others. But contrary to popular opinion, young people have a great capacity to act responsibly. We take care of friends who may have had too much to drink. Most respect our neighbours. If there’s a problem, we should be able to ask for the police’s help, not their tickets.

It’s the exceptional incidents—like last year’s riot near Fanshawe College, that popularize the image of the crazy Western students but that riot had little to do with us. We mostly don’t fit the stereotype.

And, contrary to the name, few students actually “learn” anything from Project LEARN. The campaign may have issued a large number of tickets but it has been in place for years and done little to change public opinion or improve community cohesion. What does slapping a drunken student with a $200 ticket accomplish other than agitating an already precarious relationship?

If Project LEARN is really about ensuring the London community feels safe and happy during events like homecoming, it’s time to start acknowledging students as an integral part of that very community. We need to view the London Police as resources, not risks.

Much like the London residents Project LEARN aims to protect, we’ve made London our home. We spend years in London, working and volunteering here, contributing to a city we care about. When it comes to celebrating this community on a weekend like homecoming, if Project LEARN makes students feel unwelcome, even more will plan to leave London after graduation.

So the next time the police run into the cheerleading team, they should understand that those students are cheering for the City of London as much as they are for Western University.

While the national unemployment rate currently stands at 7.2 per cent, some regions are suffering more than others. Southwestern Ontario is one such place, with Windsor and London showing 9.2 and 8.6 per cent joblessness, respectively. And so, as a business school economist in London, Ont., it isn’t surprising that the question I’m most frequently asked by non-economists is some variant of “How can we grow southwestern Ontario’s economy?”

My first response is to point to some recommended reading on the topic, including several research papers by the Mowat Institute (see here, here and here). I’m also looking forward to coming recommendations from the Ivey School of Business’ Lawrence Centre which is working on a number of regional research projects. (On the other hand, if I’m at a cocktail party and feeling glib, my response is similar to that which I gave in this middle-class roundtable.)

But there is no silver bullet—it will take a suite of smart policies and a willingness to experiment. That’s the short answer.

The longer answer is not policy prescriptions per se, but rather things we should be mindful of when developing and promoting policy ideas:

Support at the industry level should be general and based on real comparative advantages. Identifying the region’s well-positioned industries is an easier task than identifying companies, particularly when examined from the point of view of comparative advantage. Among other features, southwestern Ontario is geographically close to a number of major U.S. markets, has an excellent higher education system, a strong financial sector, strong manufacturing cluster and some of the best farmland in the world. There are ways to support industries backed by these comparative advantages without resorting to direct subsidies. Regulatory harmonization and ensuring open borders with the U.S. must be of vital importance. And ensuring pork farmers, for example, have access to European and Asian markets should be a goal of international trade negotiations.

When discussing industries, we must be wary of arguments such as “green energy is the future, so it makes sense for the government to invest there.” But what form is this government investment taking? What are the costs? Does the region have useful comparative advantages that would ensure industry survival? I find the Public Policy Keltner List useful for answering these questions.

Governments are awful at picking winning companies. Let the market figure out which companies will succeed. Providing corporate welfare to rich business people simply worsens the region’s inequality problem. We need to look elsewhere for answers.

Strong, but smart regulation canimproveexport opportunities. There is a common belief that there is always a trade-off between regulatory strength and economic growth. This doesn’t have to be the case. Strong regulation can sometimes be a comparative advantage when exporting products. The best example of this is consumer safety regulation in agriculture. Food safety is a top-of-mind concern among the middle-class in large, emerging markets such as China and India. (One only need consider the 2008 Chinese milk scandal for evidence). By ensuring that Ontario has the safest food in the world, we can use this as a unique selling proposition to overseas markets. This is a real opportunity to fill with Ontario’s agricultural products the shipping containers that return to China empty.

Where will the region get the money for infrastructure projects? A common suggestion for strengthening the regional economy involves the federal and provincial governments spending billions on infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail. There is no question this would help the area; spending billions on a Tim Raines statue for the baseball museum in St. Thomas St. Mary’s would grow the economy if it were done with some other region’s money (of course we wouldn’t build a billion dollar statute, $100 million should cover it). Similarly, this isn’t to suggest high speed rail or expanding the highway from London to Sarnia wouldn’t be useful, but rather to point out that claims of their economic benefits to the region will necessarily turn out favourably. However, that money ultimately has to come from provincial and federal governments trying to balance their budgets, so we should temper our expectations.

Look to manufacturing to create more wealth than jobs. This is best illustrated with a story. A few years ago I was giving a regulatory talk in Georgia to a group of managers and executives in the consumer aerosol products industry. One of my clients was there and asked if I would like a tour of his newest facility. I was absolutely blown away by what I saw. The factory must have been the size of several of football fields; it was large enough that golf carts were available to take you from one end to the other if you wanted. The thing I noticed most, however, was the lack of people on the floor. I saw perhaps all of two people milling around, clipboards in hand. Everything was automated, the whole process reminding me of the old board game Mouse Trap. This is the face of modern manufacturing, and it’s borne out by the manufacturing revenue per production employee data. If there is job growth in manufacturing it will be in areas such as sales, purchasing, research and development, and regulatory compliance.

Southwestern Ontarians are a resourceful lot, so I’m confident the region will fully recover from the recession and experience sustained long-run growth. Smart policies from all three levels of government can certainly help.

]]>The London Fire department has seen a spike in calls related to people getting stuck in handcuffs over the past three years, a trend that could be related to E. L. James’ popular erotic novel series Fifty Shades of Grey.

“I don’t know whether it’s the ‘Fifty Shades’ effect, but the number of incidents involving items like handcuffs seems to have gone up,” Third Officer Dave Brown tells the Associated Press.

The London Fire Brigade released data about the number of people getting body parts stuck in objects on Monday, as part of a campaign to encourage safety and reduce phone calls to 999 — the equivalent of our 911.

In total, the London Fire Brigade responded to 1,300 calls of people getting stuck in stuff since 2010, it said Monday. Of those calls, 79 incidents involved handcuffs.

Also, just in case you were wondering, here are some of the other ways Londoners got themselves stuck in things:

18 incidents involving children with their heads stuck in potties or toilet seats

Five incidents involving people’s hands being stuck in shredders

Nine instances of men with rings stuck on their penises

Four incidents where people had their hands stuck in blenders

17 incidents involving children with their fingers stuck in toys, including one with lego stuck on his finger

There was also one incident of each of the following over the past three years:

A man with his penis stuck in a toaster

A man with his arm stuck in a portaloo

A child with its hand trapped in a sweet machine

A child with its head trapped in an ironing board

An adult stuck in a child’s toy car

A child with its head stuck in a massage chair

A child with its foot stuck in a brass vase

Someone with a test tube stuck on their finger

A child with a tambourine stuck on its head

A man with a sewing machine needle stuck in his finger

While it is easy to laugh at those silly Brits calling the emergency number when a foray with a toaster goes awry, Canada has its share of shameful emergency calls, too.

The Chatham-Kent Police Service, near Windsor, released its top 12 silly calls list for 2012. Items on it include a man who called police because he lost his bottom dentures, someone whose winning Tim Hortons cup was stolen from an unlocked car and a woman who was attacked (and unharmed) by an evil duck.

On July 12, Victoria Henry, a 32-year-old native of Burnaby, B.C., was part of a six-woman team that scaled the tallest building in Europe: the Shard. Dubbed the “Greenpeace spider women,” the climbers spent 15 hours on the steep, glass surface of the 310-m London landmark. The climb was meant to publicize Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign—an effort to ban oil and gas development and industrial fishing in the North. They hung a banner at the top of the building with a “Save the Arctic” message directed at the nearby windows of Shell’s corporate offices. They were arrested, posted bail and now face a hearing on Aug. 15 and possible charges of aggravated trespassing.

Q: What did you do to plan the ascent?

A: It took months and months. It began with reconnaissance. We all went to the building to try to get some pictures and measurements. There’s facial-recognition software used [by authorities checking CCTV cameras] around that area, so people were nervous about spending too much time looking at it. I went by myself, about a week before. I took some video, which I watched a few times before going on the climb. There was a lot of discussion happening at the same time: Is this something we can do safely? Is this going to be too difficult? There was the training aspect of getting onto the building, perfecting systems of buddy checks and equipment checks. We were prepared for a series of abseils in the case of having to come down at 200 m, or something. The actual Shard has these horizontal and vertical lines that form the windows, so we had this replica. It was five feet high, and then we had a bunch of strings in different colours to represent the different ropes. We had little figurines representing each of us, with two monkeys for the top climbers.

Q: Were you scared before the climb?

A: I wasn’t able to tell anyone about doing this, not my close friends, not my family, not my partner, not anyone. I thought about this ascent almost every waking moment. When sleeping, I was dreaming about it. You can’t miss the Shard, when you’re in London. I would see it and just be struck by the enormity of the building, and there’s a huge connection there to a goal as big as saving the Arctic. There were months where I thought, “This is crazy, this is impossible.” One of my personal motivations is that very deep emotional connection that comes from childhood, of just loving nature and loving animals, and as you grow into an adult, you see natural habitats destroyed. You feel so powerless, don’t you? I don’t think I’m alone in that. And this was my one chance to do something really big.

Q: How did the day start?

A: We woke up at 2 a.m. and piled into a van. We had about 10 other people to assist us in getting onto the building, and who were there to prevent security people from dragging us away. The Shard is right next to London Bridge station. There was a hole in the top of the van, and a huge unfoldable ladder—about eight metres long or so—that, once we mounted the curb, was thrown up onto the building, the roof of the train station. We got up onto that. We used a drawbridge over a long gap to get onto the roof-like structure at the bottom of the Shard. We had several tall people with extendable poles that had ropes. We got those ropes onto the building and then quickly ascended onto those ropes, and from there, began the ascent.

Q: The building is imposing. How do you even climb that?

A: You can only really bring 50 m of rope with you. So the lead climber goes first, and when she arrived at 50 m, she would set up a series of slings and ropes around the structure that you could clip into. We could take our hands off the building, sit back, relax, have something to eat. The lead climber and I used the structure to get ourselves up, which was challenging but not impossible. There are red bars at regular [1.5-metre] intervals. My training is bouldering, which is a rope-less, very powerful kind of climbing. I was able to use the bars running down the structure to lean back really far to lift my foot up just above waist height, and use my strength to pull my body upward and inward. I know it sounds freaky. We’re experienced climbers, and for us, this was not particularly physically challenging. We put a lot into safety and security. There’s something about the building; it’s very protecting, very big, very solid. Though I had a lot of nerves before beginning, during the actual climb, I didn’t feel fear. It was quite magical, actually.

Q: At any point did you want to quit?

A: No, absolutely not. The first [50-m] pitch took us three hours, when it should have taken an hour and a half, due to some rope-management problems, and we got calls from people on the ground saying, “Listen, do one more pitch and we’re going to call whether you should keep going or not.” We said we must keep going. You don’t throw away that training. We weren’t doing it for fun.

Q: You say it wasn’t that difficult of an ascent. If I were a climber, would I think, “Big deal, you climbed the Shard”?

A: I don’t mean to say it wasn’t physically challenging, but the pictures are scarier than actually being up there. Now, when I go back and look at them, my palms sweat. But this is what we train for. Possibly because we’re women, I’m not sure why, people might think that it was a huge physical challenge for us.

Q: What did it feel like and look like from up there?

A: At that height, it seems a little bit unreal. There were points during the climb where we noticed that there weren’t any birds anymore. You could look down and see seagulls, tiny specs down below us. We were above a train station and at one point, I tweeted how they looked like little electric worms wiggling their way around. And the airplanes above us, being really close, that shocked me, as well. It was absolutely beautiful.

Q: What about eating, drinking, going to the bathroom? It was 15 hours.

A: The the day started with three bananas and some Imodium. That was a real low moment. Everyone packed what they thought would be appropriate for them: energy gels, caffeine gels, power bars. Stereotype time: vegan beef jerky. We were getting ready the day before in the warehouse, and I asked one woman, “What food are you bringing?” And she said, “I made sandwiches.” She brings this massive bag of sandwiches and I thought, “You crazy lady.” In terms of going to the bathroom, most of us used Shewee. It’s a funnel-like product that allows women to go standing up. People use them at festivals, and hikers and so on will use them. [We] cut a couple flaps in the crotches of our outfits and Velcro’d them back together, so we were able to slip [the Shewees] in and go [into containers]. You can’t take off your harness, so you have to think of a way around it.

Q: Were there people inside the Shard?

A: Most of it is still unoccupied; almost all the floors just had builders inside. The first couple of times, I was nervous that they would be aggressive or do something to put me off. But I realized they had this real admiration for what we were doing. Every floor, they were gathering with their cameras, asking if we could pose for pictures and giving us the thumbs up. They were pressing phones against the glass to show us the media coverage. One climber on the other side of the building said they were trying to give her their phone numbers. Like, sorry mate, I don’t exactly have a pen on me.

Q: And through all this, you were doing interviews and tweeting?

A: The main problem was mobile-phone coverage. There was a lot at the beginning, and a little bit at the end, but otherwise, the interviews I gave were one-liners. Half of what I tweeted made it out.

Q: What happened when you reached the top?

A: We lowered onto the viewing platform, which is on the 72nd floor. The first people to greet us were ambulance workers. They handed me a bottle of water and said to drink it right away. There was a big group. There were the police. They were really quite kind, people were making sure I was okay. Then they sort of went, “Well, of course, you’re under arrest.” We weren’t handcuffed. There was no takedown. They took us down in the elevator.

Q: You must have been expecting to be arrested.

A: We have quite an experienced legal team [at Greenpeace], as I’m sure you can imagine. We knew there would be consequences. I personally haven’t been arrested before, but I thought it was important enough for me to do this. I don’t want to jinx it, but we’ve been told by experts it’s unlikely we’ll be looking at jail time. No one was injured and the building wasn’t damaged. It feels like a big thing, but in the eyes of the law, it’s not considered a serious crime.

Q: What do you think the lasting impact is going to be of those 15 hours?

A: This is probably one of the biggest actions Greenpeace has ever taken. We’re blown away by the media coverage. People were talking about us in the U.S., Singapore, Australia, and I really don’t think the impact can be overestimated. If you look back at the record Greenpeace has, especially with Antarctica, you’ll see why I have this utter confidence that we will be successful.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/on-scaling-a-london-landmark-protesting-arctic-drilling-and-getting-arrested-for-your-cause/feed/4Poll: When is the new royal prince or princess arriving?http://www.macleans.ca/authors/patricia-treble/poll-when-is-the-new-royal-prince-or-princess-arriving/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/patricia-treble/poll-when-is-the-new-royal-prince-or-princess-arriving/#commentsMon, 08 Jul 2013 18:20:16 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=402916All eyes are on Kate, duchess of Cambridge

The media is camped outside St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Those not sleeping there overnight are obsessively checking smartphones for the slightest hint that Kate, duchess of Cambridge, may be, possibly, going into labour.

Reportedly, there are detailed plans to get the princely father-to-be from his job as a search-and-rescue pilot in Wales to London in time.

And this morning came word that another great-grandchild is on the way. Zara Phillips, Princess Anne’s daughter who won silver at the London Olympics, announced that she and her husband, rugby star Mike Tindall, are having a baby in the New Year.

For now, there is nothing to do but obsess about trivia, such as the exact nomenclature of the new baby’s title. First the backstory: Earlier this year everyone realized that, unless Her Majesty did something, the third-generation heir wouldn’t be a prince or princess, but the child of a duke. So Elizabeth II changed the rules to upgrade the title of her third great-grandchild in this official notice:

The Queen has been pleased by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated 31 December 2012 to declare that all the children of the eldest son of The Prince of Wales should have and enjoy the style, title and attribute of Royal Highness with the titular dignity of Prince or Princess prefixed to their Christian names or with such other titles of honour.

While the title change became public in January, now everyone has oh-so-much time on their hands that they have the luxury of delving into an extended worry session about whether there’s a “the” in front of the name or not. (According to expert Joe Little of Majesty, the answer is no.)

Given everyone is just waiting and watching, the only thing left to do is launch a poll on when you think the royal baby will make his or her grand appearance. You can take a flutter on an auspicious day — July 14 is Bastille Day in France — or throw a dart at a date. For the curious, betting firm William Hill has calculated the odds of when it thinks the baby will born.

For only the third time in more than six decades, Prince Philip wasn’t at Saturday’s Trooping the Colour, the military parade that celebrates the Queen’s official birthday (the weather is too iffy on her real one in April). He’s still in hospital recovering from exploratory surgery on Monday, and will be there for at least another week before spending the summer recuperating.

So when the Queen travelled from Buckingham Palace to the nearby Horse Guards for the elaborately dramatic march past of the Household Division, featuring the 1st Battalion, Welsh Guards this year, it was her first cousin, Edward, duke of Kent, who sat beside her in the coach. Normally the duke, as honourary colonel of the Scots Guards rides on horseback behind the Queen’s carriage, along with Prince Charles (Welsh Guards), Princess Anne (Blues and Royals) and Prince William (Irish Guards). However, in March the 77-year-old suffered a mild stroke, so perhaps this was a good way to avoid a long time in the saddle.

For all the crowds cheering on Kate, duchess of Cambridge, as the eight-month pregnant wife of Prince William travelled in a carriage with Prince Harry and Camilla, duchess of Cambridge, there was also an acknowledgment of the man who wasn’t there. Philip has only missed the parades in 1962 and 1963 because he was abroad on royal tours. This is one of those “must go to” events in the royal calendar. Last year, he was out of hospital only a few days after battling a bladder infection before he got on his horse as colonel of the Grenadier Guards.

Still, though Buckingham Palace has been its usual taciturn self when it comes to releasing information about his medical condition, there are indications that he’s getting better. Yesterday he had six royal visitors including four grandchildren–William, Harry, Beatrice and Eugenie–as well as his oldest son Charles and his wife, Camilla. And today his wife, Queen Elizabeth II, paid a second visit after taking part in the military parade and then watching the Royal Air Force flypast from the Buckingham Palace balcony.

Trooping the Colour marks the start of one of the busiest parts of the royal calendar for the Queen. Monday is the annual Order of the Garter ceremony at Windsor Castle, and the rest of the week is spent at Royal Ascot. She will fulfill her duties as she’s always done. But no doubt she’ll also be worrying about her 92-year-old husband as he recovers in hospital.

]]>The smell of cultivated marijuana is spreading across England this week, courtesy of Crimestoppers U.K.

The crime-fighting charity is mass mailing scratch-and-sniff cards which replicate the smell of growing cannabis plants to help homeowners identify possible marijuana grow ops in their neighbourhoods. Police will also hand out the cards.

A total of 210,000 scratch-and-sniff cards will be distributed this week in areas of England which Crimestoppers says police have identified as “hot spots” of marijuana cultivation. The cards are more than a publicity gimmick. Crimestoppers U.K. says it hopes citizens will scratch, sniff and possibly call Crimestoppers to pass along an anonymous tip.

Here’s what the cards look like:

While announcing the campaign Tuesday, Crimestoppers U.K. said British police are seeing “a significant move” of marijuana farms to urban residences from rural, industrial and commercial sites. “Not many people know how to recognize the signs of cannabis cultivation, which is increasingly happening in their neighbourhood,” Crimestoppers U.K. operations director Roger Critchell said in a press release.

As well as producing a whiff of a marijuana plant, the green-and-black cards list eight tell-tale signs a grow op may be in business down the block. This includes No. 1. “Strong and sickly sweet smell” to No. 8. “Lots of cables.”

(Sign No. 2 is a bit suspect, however — “Cannabis growing equipment.” If one is familiar enough with cannabis growing equipment to recognize it, then it’s doubtful one is going to call Crimestoppers to report the sighting.)

And no, Aunt Mabel is not going to get high by sniffing the scratch card when it comes in the post. “It’s a replica chemical fragrance,” said Crimestoppers spokesperson Giselle Lares. “There is no actual trace of THC, the active ingredient in real cannabis.”

The smell replicates live mature marijuana plants, not the smell of a burning joint.

Crimestoppers is first targeting the mass mailing to areas where police have busted the most cultivation houses recently — South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and London. Thirteen regions in all will receive the cards by the end of the week, Lares said. Currently, England is the only part of Britain to get the cards.

Beyond busting local criminals, Crimestoppers says there is a strong connection between organized crime and marijuana grow houses, saying that a grow-op in a residential neighbourhood can lead to increased in crime and violence. A secondary concern is that grow ops illegally tap into the power grid to supply the large amounts of heat and light required for a commercial marijuana farm.

Crimestoppers U.K. picked up the idea of the scratch-and-sniff cannabis cards from its sister organization in marijuana-friendly Holland, where a similar campaign to make the public aware of the dangers of grow ops “had good results” three years ago, Lares said.

Although marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, laws against smoking, buying and selling cannabis have not been enforced there since 1976, and licensed coffee shops are allowed to sell the drug in small amounts.

But police in the Netherlands still crack down on illegal growing operations, in part because the environmentally conscientious Dutch frown on the large amounts of energy involved in commercial marijuana cultivation. Because heavy electrical use is viewed suspiciously by authorities, pot farmers in the Netherlands often tap into the power grid illegally to get unmetered electricity.

As a result, the Dutch scratch-and-sniff campaign was funded by one of the country’s major power companies, Stedin Netbeheer BV, which estimated it was losing $15 million a year to grow-op energy thieves.

The British scratch-and-sniff campaign is funded by “various police forces and some of our regular partners,” Lares said. Power providers are not involved.

No word yet from Canada’s various Crimestoppers organizations on whether the scratch-and-sniff idea will make it to this side of the Atlantic.

The most startling bit of data buried in last December’s U.K. census was the sharp decline of the white British population in London. Over the past decade, it turns out, the British capital has seen roughly 620,000 white natives move out. That’s like the entire population of Hamilton up and leaving over the course of 10 years. As a consequence, white Britons now make up a minority of the city’s residents, at just 45 per cent, compared to 60 per cent in 2001.

It’s a disconcerting trend, smacking as it does of “white flight,” the mid-to-late 20th-century American population shift that saw much of that country’s white middle class abandoning crime-ridden city centres for leafier, more racially homogenized suburbs. That shift left many American cities divided along racial and class lines, with some commentators blaming it for leaving many downtown cores (Detroit’s, for instance, or Cleveland’s) husks of their former selves.

But in Britain, where racist attitudes have seen a sharp decline, the trend seems particularly out of step—especially in a multicultural capital like London. Interestingly, the census also revealed that the nation’s mixed-race population has risen to 12 million and mostly resides in London. So the rather awkward questions left to the population experts are: who are these fleeing white British, where have they gone, and why are they leaving?

The conundrum is baffling academics. “Most geographers did not expect London to become a majority minority city for another 20 or 30 years,” Eric Kaufman, a specialist in ethnic migration at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, recently told the Financial Times—“they have underestimated the extent to which white people have opted to leave an increasing diverse London.” And few politicians seem to want to touch the issue, which doesn’t fit with the mainstream vision of a tolerant, multicultural Britain.

The analysts are divided on the question. A new report by the BBC’s home editor Mark Easton says the trend may not be driven by xenophobia at all, but something much more innocent: the white working-class dream of selling up and escaping to the seaside. But David Goodhart, author of the forthcoming book on immigration, The British Dream, says “certain areas of London have changed more quickly than most people are comfortable with. It’s not racist, it’s basic human social psychology that people want to move on.”

Glancing at a population map of the U.K.’s demographic shift, it’s immediately apparent that the exit of white Britons was not from the city’s affluent core (where the international super-rich have settled en masse in the past 10 years, resulting in a higher international white population of wealthy Europeans), but in the more suburban, down-at-heel outer boroughs. In particular, Barking and Dagenham, two boroughs on the city’s outer eastern edge—the latter made famous as the setting for the period film, Made In Dagenham, about a group of female factory workers who fought for equal pay at a Ford plant in 1968—have seen a dramatic drop in their white British population. It’s perhaps not coincidental that these two areas were the only parts of London in the which the British National Party, the anti-immigration party, actually had some traction during the last election.

But as with most things British, the story is complex. Dagenham was cemented as a working class stronghold with the 1931 opening of the Ford plant, which gave rise to the British suburban dream. But the U.K.’s manufacturing sector has since all but dried up (Ford Dagenham, which at its peak employed 40,000 workers now barely employs 4,000 and will further contract this year). And in the last two decades, many of the boroughs’ public housing residents went from tenants to owners, thanks to a government scheme allowing residents to buy their council houses for 30 per cent of market value. “For many white British households, the 2000s had left them without a job but with a sizable chunk of capital in their home,” Easton explains. “Some had also benefited from redundancy payouts and pension deals offered by Ford. It was a cue to move on.”

While some emigrated abroad, many others moved to coastal towns or quiet villages in the countryside. New research shows that smaller communities in sleepy parts of counties like Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Essex have seen a 10 to 14 per cent rise in their white British population in recent years. And one need only take a holiday to any quaint seaside village on the Suffolk or Norfolk coast to see the explosion of new residents renovating their recently acquired homes.

So is this London’s white flight? Not exactly. White bright new beginnings is more like it. Just goes to show that sometimes, for some lucky people, even economic downturns have their upsides.

]]>If you really want to see benefits from working out, consider a move to the central London area of Westminster. There, overweight Londoners could see their benefit payments rise and fall depending on how often they hit the gym. Under the controversial new proposal, a family doctor could prescribe exercise to obese patients, who would then be rewarded with financial incentives if they followed the doctor’s orders—or be penalized if they didn’t. “You could use council tax benefits to incentivize people to undertake more healthy activities,” says Jonathan Carr-West, of the Local Government Information Unit, the think tank that wrote the report for Westminster city council. Obesity costs Britain about $8 billion a year, he notes. “We have to try and be innovative, and we have to try and be radical.” The idea made headlines across the country—and drew scoffs from the medical establishment. The British Medical Association’s Lawrence Buckman, a family doctor, said when he heard the idea, “I thought it was a joke.” But Carr-West isn’t bothered by criticisms. “Doctors haven’t been able to solve this problem,” he says. “We need to try something else.” The report comes ahead of a dramatic change in health administration that will see local councils take control of public health care budgets from the National Health Service in April. “It’s a preventative measure to save money,” says Carr-West. And a whole new way to monetize pounds.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/fat-and-on-welfare-look-out/feed/1Fraud case of ex-Liberal MP, current Ontario mayor, due in courthttp://www.macleans.ca/general/fraud-case-of-ex-liberal-mp-current-ontario-mayor-due-in-court/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/fraud-case-of-ex-liberal-mp-current-ontario-mayor-due-in-court/#commentsTue, 08 Jan 2013 11:20:31 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=334442LONDON, Ont. – Lawyers for an Ontario mayor who is facing criminal charges stemming from his time as a Liberal member of Parliament will appear in court today.
Joe Fontana…

]]>LONDON, Ont. – Lawyers for an Ontario mayor who is facing criminal charges stemming from his time as a Liberal member of Parliament will appear in court today.

Joe Fontana was charged in November by the RCMP with fraud under $5,000, breach of trust by a public official and uttering forged documents.

Police say the value of the alleged fraud is $1,700, and the London Free Press has reported that a Government of Canada cheque for that amount was given to a London club to cover a deposit for the wedding reception for Fontana’s son in 2005.

Fontana’s first court appearance on the charges is set for Tuesday, but his lawyer Gord Cudmore says the mayor won’t be in court.

Lawyers will be appearing on his behalf and the case is expected to be adjourned to another date.

Fontana has refused to step down as mayor while the charges are pending, denying any wrongdoing and Cudmore says he will be pleading not guilty.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/fraud-case-of-ex-liberal-mp-current-ontario-mayor-due-in-court/feed/0Joe Fontana chargedhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/joe-fontana-charged/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/joe-fontana-charged/#commentsWed, 21 Nov 2012 19:05:28 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=317403Former Liberal MP Joe Fontana, currently the mayor of London, has been charged by the RCMP in connection with a cheque used to pay for his son’s wedding reception.The …

]]>Former Liberal MP Joe Fontana, currently the mayor of London, has been charged by the RCMP in connection with a cheque used to pay for his son’s wedding reception.

The charges of fraud, breach of trust by a public official and uttering forged documents were filed against him Wednesday by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police following an investigation of more than two months. They relate to a $1,700 cheque issued by Public Works Canada that was used to pay the Marconi Club — a London social club. A copy of the stub from that cheque was obtained by The Free Press and published five weeks ago. The invoice number on the cheque stub, dated April 6, 2005, matched that of the Marconi Club invoice issued about six months earlier. A former Marconi Club manager told The Free Press Fontana later produced a similar cheque for the $18,900 balance owing. He said he remembered the payment clearly because he had to chase Fontana six months to get it.

At the time, Fontana was a Liberal member of Parliament for London North Centre and federal minister of labour and housing. He was elected mayor in late 2010 and is midway through his four-year term.

3. A scientist from the University of Chicago posted a really dumb statement on Facebook after the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience: “There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually high concentration of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain? No offense to anyone..” Suffice it to say that offense was taken.

4. The dreaded premenstrual syndrome (PMS) may be a myth, according to University of Toronto researchers. They say that although the cramping, bloating and headaches are real, society overemphasizes the relationship between mood swings and menstrual cycles. (Maybe those perceived bad moods instead have something to do with male scientists’ Facebook posts?)

6. Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae was at Queen’s University this week and took a few questions from the Queen’s Journal. When asked whether he supports the universities setting their own tuition, he responded with this: “Yes I do. The only way we are going to allow [universities] to move forward is to give them greater freedom in tuition. The government needs a stronger mandate for lower income students. The two go together. We have become so fixated on having a common level of tuition that we fail to recognize the need for universities to differentiate themselves.”

8. It’s week three of The Bachelor and Brad Smith spent part of it “showing off his baby daddy potential when he flew five girls to Mexico and bequeathed soccer equipment onto underprivileged kids,” writes Sonya Bell, one-third of Maclean’s bachelor panel. Smith also showed off his body.

9. Lady Gaga says she’s launching a “healthy drinking water brand.” I can’t imagine anything healthier than plain old water, but I have a feeling that it will sell. That woman is a marketing genius.

]]>Eight girls are facing charges in a bullying case at a high school in London, police in the southwestern Ontario city said.

The arrests were made as part of an investigation that revealed a student at the school had been the target of physical, emotional and cyber bullying, police said.

The eight suspects are each charged with criminal harassment and have been released from custody on a promise to appear in court.

Police could not say Friday when the hearing would take place.

They said information about the alleged bullying came from direct statements and through an anonymous reporting portal on the school website.

Police said officials have been able to support the victim, ensure the student was safe and then address the bullying behaviour.

The investigation is continuing and police said additional charges may be laid.

The arrests came as several schools and groups prepared to pay tribute Friday to bullying victims, including a British Columbia teen who committed suicide after enduring years of Internet sexual exploitation and torment by her peers.

Amanda Todd, who was from Port Coquitlam, B.C., took her own life last week, the latest in a series of high-profile bullying incidents that have come to tragic conclusions.

Her story — laid out in a YouTube video posted online a month before her death — captured worldwide attention and revived debate over how to prevent bullying and deal with those who commit the abuse.

On Monday, a New Democrat MP introduced a motion calling for the creation of a House of Commons committee to develop a national bullying prevention strategy that would examine the prevalence and impact of bullying and look for ways to prevent it.

Several provinces have also taken steps to tackle the issue.

Ontario passed anti-bullying legislation in June, a few months after a 13-year-old boy was acquitted of robbing and assaulting 11-year-old Mitchell Wilson in a bullying case that garnered widespread attention.

Wilson, who suffered from muscular dystrophy, killed himself last September.

The legislation was introduced in the wake of another high-profile case, the death last year of 15-year-old Jamie Hubley, a boy who was targeted as an openly gay student at his Ottawa school.

Recent federal studies indicate that one in five children or youth have reported being victimized by bullies.

]]>Western University students know how to accessorize. Some keep it subtle—a scarf here, a crown of flowers there. Others aren’t afraid to wear Mustang purple from head-to-toe. Jessica Darmanin went to London, Ont. on homecoming weekend to snap these stylish students. To see what students are wearing at other universities, click here. Since she can’t make it to every campus, why not show us your fall fashion? Tweet your photo to @maconcampus or post it on our Facebook wall.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/where-the-hot-accessory-is-anything-purple/feed/0The road to Ottawa goes through Southwestern Ontariohttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-road-to-ottawa-goes-through-southwestern-ontario/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-road-to-ottawa-goes-through-southwestern-ontario/#commentsThu, 13 Sep 2012 12:00:19 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=293049Ahead of the fall sitting, the NDP leader goes to Windsor.“It was important to come here because this area feels the effects of the policies of the Harper government,” …

“It was important to come here because this area feels the effects of the policies of the Harper government,” said Mulcair. “The manufacturing sector has been hit particularly hard here … Yet the government puts all its eggs in the resources basket while manufacturing loses hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

“We’re losing the balanced economy that Canada had built up since the Second World War. It’s been destabilized by the choices of the Conservatives.” Long-term, good-paying manufacturing jobs with pensions are being replaced by part-time jobs in the service sector that don’t come with a pension, Mulcair said.

Canada has put “all its economic eggs in the resource basket,” he said, and must include the environmental costs of developments such as the oilsands if it wants to compete internationally. “That’s had an effect of artificially raising the value of the Canadian dollar, which has made it increasingly difficult for manufacturing companies in this area to export. That’s one of the leading causes of the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector,” Mulcair told reporters. “We’re not against the development of the oilsands, that would be foolish. We are saying that we’re against the development that’s going on now because it’s not sustainable.”

Mulcair tells 570 News it was quite impressive, “it’s very promising and a great way to create jobs for the future, and they’re the best kind of jobs, high tech jobs” “I think that its a model to be followed across Canada and the region needs to be congratulated for being such a leader in this area.” Mulcair says jobs in Canada tend to be created by small and medium size businesses, and that they are the key to helping the Canadian economy rebound not giving tax breaks to big corporations, like banks and gas companies.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-road-to-ottawa-goes-through-southwestern-ontario/feed/2It’s the Geek Olympics, and British sports engineers are winning goldhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/its-the-geek-olympics-and-british-engineers-are-winning-gold/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/its-the-geek-olympics-and-british-engineers-are-winning-gold/#commentsFri, 10 Aug 2012 18:38:57 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=282995Especially the cyclists, much to the surprise, and annoyance, of the French

The French, who know a thing or two about cycling, have taken an intense and suspicious interest in Great Britain’s extraordinary success in all things bicycle at the London 2012 Summer Games. Well, if they’re upset now, they’d better brace themselves for what Britain’s geek squad of sports engineers has planned for the future. Spray on clothing, anyone?

Britain’s medal haul prompted the French newspaper L’Équipe to commission a poll on the issue. The result: 70 per cent think the British must be cheating, somehow.

When Jason Kenny won gold in the sprint, back when Britain just had a lowly five golds in track cycling alone, it was all too much for second-place Grégory Baugé of France. He turned the resulting news conference into an inquisition. Peppering Kenny with questions about his preparation, and why British cyclists always seem to peak at the Olympics.

France’s cycling team director Isabelle Gauther questioned how the British were gaining so many valuable tenths of seconds? Are they using “magic wheels,” she wondered in one interview. That prompted a typically understated response from Chris Boardman, the British cycling team’s head of research and development. “The main thing about the wheels,” he said, “is that they are round.”

Ah, but it’s not nearly that simple. The magic is in the science, and no sport has benefited more than cycling.

There’s the wind tunnel work that Canada among other countries also do to tweak bike, helmet, riding suits and rider positions. There’s carbon fibre bike frames and cranks, special saddles and handle bars and silk tires for the velodrome bikes, inflated to massive pressure. It’s the little things that count; witness one member of Britain’s cycling science team with the title: “head of marginal gains.”

But all that is old-school compared to what the British engineers have on the drawing board. They offered a tantalizing peek in a paper recently published by Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Herewith a sample:

“Spray-on clothing

Developments in nanotechnology mean ‘spray on clothing’ could become a reality within a matter of years. A liquid-repellent coating would keep the rider dry, and thus lighter, while a protective coating could make helmets tougher without adding weight. Triathletes could use ‘spray chambers’ to change clothing instantaneously between the swimming, cycling and running events, tailoring their outfit for each event.

Phase change’ tyres

UK engineers are beginning to develop materials that, using nanotechnology, are able to change shape depending on certain conditions. This could have a transformative impact on sports equipment. Oars could bend as they hit the water to improve their hydrodynamism, ship hulls could naturally bend into corners or bicycle tyres could vary their tread depending on terrain.

Printed shoes

3D printing, is set to revolutionize manufacturing in the coming decades. Sport will be no exception. Engineers could produce virtually any piece of equipment, including shoes, minutes before the event to suit the exact weather conditions or even the athlete’s physical condition, compensating for any injuries they may have.”

The report touches lightly on the ethics: do such advances give an “unfair advantage” to those that win the technological arms race, it asked. Not surprisingly, the teckkies aren’t inclined to think so. Engineering, it notes, “has gone hand in hand with sporting success since the ancient Greeks first turned a lump of stone into a smooth, aerodynamic discus.”

]]>It’s the morning of the opening ceremonies of the London 2012 Summer Games and, ho-boy, I’ve seen this movie before. There’s a national biorhythm—an emotional arc de triomphe, if you will—that plays out during the span of every Olympics I’ve attended. I saw it in Calgary in 1988 and in Vancouver in 2010 and in a bunch of other Olympics in between.

It begins on the high of winning the Olympic bid, then it peaks and troughs many times over the long years of preparation. The successes, as the winning city basks in international limelight, are soon worn down by doubts, fears, cost concerns, internal bickering and impatience with a process that takes so bloody long that it seems the whole country is in the back seat of the family Buick screaming “Are we there yet?”

And then we are.

So, finally, it’s the opening morning of the XXX Summer Games. (A word of warning: don’t type that into your search engine because we’re talking Roman Numerals here and not the sort of, um, unsanctioned activities that a Google search will turn up.) But I digress.

What the Brits have been experiencing is an amped-up version of the anxiety that any good host feels in the moments before a pile of guests arrive at your home for an elaborate dinner party. You cast your eyes about the house and realize that, whoa! you really should have shampooed the rug, and the canapés got a bit singed, you neglected to ask if anyone has food allergies and, oh, my, whatever are we going to talk about with all these strange people?

Today, a read of the morning papers reveals the inevitable next phase. The door has been thrown open, you’ve shoved drinks at the guests and, by God, we just might pull this off! As the Guardian said in its lead editorial today: “London has a smile on its face and the country seems to have a sense that the next 17 days may actually be pretty wonderful.”

Or as The Times opined: “As the Games begin, we must remember that it is not only the athletes who have the attention of the world. All of Britain does. With the perfect combination of humility and pride, we should bask in it.” And, finally, the Daily Telegraph: “The Games of the XXX Olympiad, to give them their official title, promise to be one of the greatest spectacles this country has seen, to be remembered, we hope, for all the right sporting reasons.”

If anyone should know how this arc of angst goes, it’s Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency and the savior of the scandal-plagued 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games. And yet he put his foot in it while visiting London, expressing to NBC anchor Brian Williams that he found the security cock-ups and the threats of labour unrest “disconcerting.” He wondered if the country will come together and celebrate. “That’s something which we only find out once the Games actually begin.”

Well, the newspapers here are aflame. Never mind that their scribes shouted the same doubts from their bully pulpits only yesterday. That a foreigner said more or less the same things, expressed in the mildest possible terms, is interpreted here as a major diplomatic blunder. “’Nowhere man’ Romney loses his way with gaffe about the Games,” quoth the Times.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, quick to read the welcome switch in national mood, fired back at Romney. “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/what-a-difference-a-day-makes-eh-wot/feed/4The princess behind the Gameshttp://www.macleans.ca/society/the-princess-behind-the-games/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-princess-behind-the-games/#commentsFri, 20 Jul 2012 19:28:47 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=275970Anne, a former Olympic competitor, played a key role in lobbying for London as host

When the London Olympics open on July 27, the world’s eyes will be focused on the athletes, the celebrities taking part in the opening ceremony and Queen Elizabeth II, who will officially open the 17-day event. Lost in that crowd will be the woman perhaps most responsible for getting the Games to the British capital. But Princess Anne seems to thrive in being upstaged, even if one of those people will be her own daughter Zara, a skilled horsewoman who completing for Britain in the three-day eventing challenge.

Anne, who was a European three-day champ in the 70s and who rode (and fell) for Britain at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, is known as the workhorse of the Windsor clan for maintaining a punishing schedule. In addition to her other duties, Anne, 61, is head of the British Olympic Committee and a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Before London was selected in 2005, she played a key role in lobbying for London to fellow IOC members, something she’s never done in the past. She even got her mother, the Queen, to host an Olympic reception at Buckingham Palace.

In May, just before receiving the Olympic torch in Greece, Sebastian Coe, the former gold-medal sprinter who heads the London organizing committee, said, “Her commitment and passion for this is absolutely extraordinary.” When we have a board meeting at midday she has often opened two hospitals and a school by then.” British Olympic Minister Hugh Robertson concurred: “She is one of the great unsung heroes of this whole process. She played a key role in delivering the bid, she is president of the British Olympic Association, she sits on Seb’s board and she has 30 years experience of international sport. Because she is who she is she never asks for any thanks or praise, but she has played a remarkable role in this, and it is completely unheralded and largely unthanked.”

So it was typical that when Anne received the Olympic torch in Greece, she quickly handed it off to the über-photogenic David Beckham. Now, as the final countdown starts, she’s getting her due, though it’s more of a pat on a back than gushing prose. When the Washington Post recently ran an Associated Press article about Anne, its anaemic headline was “Princess Anne: not the flashiest, but when it comes to the Olympics, the princess has her fans.”After all, this is a woman who is famously rude to those who waste her time: Her favourite oath? “Naff off,” which is a variation of f–k off. And, she’s well into middle age, her harsh hair style hasn’t changed in decades, nor have her clothes, which are so endlessly recycled that the tabloids virtually celebrate when she looks well turned-out.

Still, for someone who’s been in the public eye since her birth, she sounds relieved that she doesn’t have to be an athlete today. “I would have found it really difficult to do it on a home patch—much easier to have done it elsewhere. I’d hate to be doing it now,” she said in an interview to BBC Sports. “All the things the electronic media have opened up, simply didn’t exist when I was doing it. Some people do find it a help, I am sure, but I suspect for others that’s a difficult level of intrusion to manage.”

But don’t mistake those concerns for fear. She’s not easily intimidated. For decades, she’s tramped through Third World villages as part of her three-decade long stint as president of Save the Children Fund. And in 1974, there was an attempt to kidnap her when a mentally ill Ian Ball ambushed her car outside Buckingham Palace in March 1974. Her bodyguard, another policeman, her driver and a passing journalist were all shot. As the BBC later recounted, “In a document written for prime minister Harold Wilson, the princess said the only thing that had stopped her from hitting Ball was the thought that he would shoot her.”

Given the massive security operation blanketing London, we hope that’s one thing Anne doesn’t have to worry about this summer.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-princess-behind-the-games/feed/1An alternative sightseeing guide to Londonhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/life/an-alternative-sightseeing-guide-to-london/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/an-alternative-sightseeing-guide-to-london/#commentsFri, 20 Jul 2012 15:38:20 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=272988Forget queues: Why not drink good coffee, walk through flower markets, and get up close and personal with some street art?

]]>London is a city so crammed that walking down the street on any given day is like a game of human pin-ball. Olympic London will be worse: as in, waiting-in-line-all-day-to-get-into-the-Tate Modern worse. Wouldn’t you rather avoid the masses and see the city like a stay-cating Londoner? Sure you would. Here’s an unconventional guide to sightseeing in London:

Michael Dales/Flickr

COFFEE
Wake up and what’s on your mind? Coffee, of course. There’re lots of great coffee shops in London but only one where you can learn latte art from a World Barista champion between your sips of flat white. A few years ago, Gwilym Davies was running his coffee cart in East London when his friends entered him in the World Barista Championship competition on a whim. When the flat cap-wearing Yorkshireman won the title in 2009, the charming cart was soon overrun and Davies opened Prufrock’s, a laid-back café and learning space. You can just sit and sip in the café or, as the café’s namesake poem suggests, dive in and measure out your Saturday with coffee spoons: Prufrock’s offers three-hour classes in Brew Methods, Coffee Tastings and Latte Art, among others.

Don’t want to work so hard for your cup? Full Stop Café is great to watch weekenders browse Brick Lane market. Bonus: it also serves handcrafted ales from Redchurch Brewery, made just up the road.

Jay Bergesen/Flickr

WALKCoffee buzz kicking in, you’d probably like to do some shopping. You don’t need a red toy phone booth and under no circumstances should you buy a reusable Harrods bag. The Columbia Road Flower Market is capable of giving you that souvenir experience we all hope to find when we travel and it will put your senses to work. There’s that rainbow of blossoms lining the street, the strong sniff of hollyhocks from the stall next door, and then there’s all that yelling. Men with gold chains and cockney accents holler things like ‘Lilies fer a fiver! Buy ‘em for your wife, buy ‘em fer someone else’s wife!’ You’ll feel like an extra in Guy Ritchie Presents London! with blooms instead of bullets. Don’t forget your camera – this place is rich in photo-op gold. On your way out, pick up some irises to brighten up your hotel room. Go around closing time to get the best deals. Sunday 8 am – 2 pm.

Left: MadHatterr/Flickr Right: Cannonsnapper/Flickr

ART GALLERY
Most art galleries in London are free and the streets, spilling over with graffiti, are no different. London is known for its incendiary street art—this is, after all, the land of Banksy. And there are many pockets across town where you can witness a slice of the London art scene as it happens – amazing artists paint the walls in the sunken ball courts at Stockwell Park Estate almost weekly in the summer. The Leake Street tunnel by Waterloo station is easily accessible and was the site of Banksy’s 2008 Cans Festival, an urban street art party where artists from around the world came to beautify the tunnel. Brick Lane and Old Street is street art central in London. Curtain Rd, Holywell Lane and Rivington St. are packed with so many stencils, posters and coats of spray paint, you’ll feel like Alice in graffiti wonderland.

pietroizzo/Flickr

MUSEUM
London is an old city. And sure, sometimes those ancient buildings can make you feel like you’re in an open-air museum. But most main streets have some combination of 30 chain stores, like Carphone Warehouse,Tesco and Willam Hill betting shops, giving them a terrible cookie-cutter effect. You’ll need a pretty good imagination to feel the spirit of Swinging London in Soho or the refinement of the Edwardian gentry in Kensington. But Highgate Cemetery on the north end of town looks utterly frozen in time. The sprawling cemetery, packed with crooked headstones and weeping stone angels wrapped in dense ivy, is a morbid and beautiful monument to the Victorian obsession with death.It’s the resting place of Karl Marx, poet Christina Rossetti and writer George Elliot, among others. Go on a misty day for full effect. The West Cemetery can be viewed only by tour and it’s worth it – you’ll feel like you’ve time travelled.

Kake Pugh/Flickr

DINNER
Instead of Googling a restaurant online (and scrutinizing the menu beforehand so you know exactly what you’ll be ordering), The School of Life has a more innovative idea on how to dine. The resource centre, originally set up as a school to get through the school of hard knocks, not only offers classes with philosophical titles like “How to be Creative” and “How Necessary is a Relationship,” but they also host intimate meals where diners are encouraged to weigh in with their own ideas and experiences. Think of it like a diner’s salon. Gone are the ‘what do you do for a living’ banalities and other cocktail-hour platitudes. At these dinners, you’re likely to intimately relate to how someone feels about the concept of guilty pleasure or how to best develop compassion before even knowing their name. Next month, they’re hosting a Picnic with Thoreau in a secluded London park. Sip Pimm’s and nibble potato salad while discussing self-discovery and purpose, with strangers!

If that’s too intimating, The Holly Bush in Hampstead is the most charming pub in London. You’ll get standard English fare like beef & ale pie with Eton mess for dessert. Walk the Hampstead streets and admire the chocolate box houses, as you digest.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/an-alternative-sightseeing-guide-to-london/feed/1Frozen pizza economicshttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/frozen-pizza-economics/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/frozen-pizza-economics/#commentsFri, 25 May 2012 12:00:38 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=261232Yesterday, the Harper government announced $12 million in funding for Dr. Oetker to help the German food processing company set up a frozen pizza factory in London, Ont. The Canadian…

]]>Yesterday, the Harper government announced $12 million in funding for Dr. Oetker to help the German food processing company set up a frozen pizza factory in London, Ont. The Canadian Restaurant and Food Association, while also noting the effects of the supply management system, is displeased.

We create jobs and play a key role in the economy in every community across Canada. We do this without handouts or special assistance from government. Our members are deeply troubled that your government is using tax dollars, paid by our members, as a direct subsidy to their competitors who threaten their market share and ongoing businesses viability. This is on top of the $7-million subsidy this same pizza manufacturer received from the Government of Ontario last year.

Your government’s announcement today may be good news for this foreign-based multinational, but it is precisely the opposite for CRFA members. They are asking why is your government so ready to give multi-million-dollar taxpayer handouts to their competitors, while a “Made in Canada” policy penalizes them.

The Conservatives say the new plant will create over 300 jobs. (When the Ontario government made its announcement, the math was a bit different.) For 300 jobs, a $12-million investment works out to $40,000 per job.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/frozen-pizza-economics/feed/12Boris Johnson of London vs. Toronto’s Rob Ford: One bumbles, one fumbleshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/one-bumbles-one-fumbles/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/one-bumbles-one-fumbles/#commentsFri, 11 May 2012 18:05:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=257809While the two municipal politicians diverge in their weaknesses, they are united in their charms

Consider for a moment the improbable parallels between the newly re-elected mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and Toronto’s scandal-embroiled leader, Rob Ford. Both are outspoken, gaffe-prone conservatives with a clownish fallibility that is as appealing to voters as it is often appalling. Both have been underestimated to the ultimate detriment of their political opponents and are defined by their obsession with bikes. (Johnson rides his everywhere while Ford would like to see them more or less banned from the roads.) Both loathe unions and graffiti, love senior citizens and commuters and never saw a tax they didn’t want to cut. Even their names lend themselves to similar diminutives: BoJo and RoFo. Creepy, huh?

Their similarities even extend to their oddly distinctive looks. Zaftig, rumple-suited and childishly tow-headed, the two men share a squishable Pillsbury Doughboy quality that belies a deeper ambition and steel. To the unacquainted, both mayors appear vulnerable and as slow-moving as overfed lab rats, and yet each managed to storm city hall on his first attempt despite the cards being stacked against him. More remarkable still, both accomplished this feat in roughly the same way—by tirelessly courting the outlying edges of their respective cities rather than the downtown core. Here in London, political commentators described this effect as the “Boris doughnut,” while in downtown Toronto, they call it “revenge of the suburbs.” In both cases, appealing to the suburbs is a strategy that’s worked well—in Johnson’s case twice. Last week the London mayor was re-elected over his Labour rival Ken Livingstone by a narrow three percentage point margin, a crucial win for the British Tories who were otherwise humiliated in recent local elections across the country.

Ford, who won’t face re-election until late 2014 (presuming he decides to run), has also been in the news lately, but for far less happy reasons. His feud with the Toronto Star newspaper, which began during the 2010 election campaign, reached new heights recently during a confrontation outside his home between himself and Daniel Dale, one of that paper’s city hall reporters. Ford insists his family was being spied on, while Dale claims he was chased and intimidated into dropping his cellphone and tape recorder by the 300-plus-lb. mayor who allegedly approached him with “a fist cocked as if he wanted to punch me.” (Each denies the other’s version of events. Police are investigating whether any crime was committed.) One thing is certain: Ford’s already strong dislike of the Star is now an official hate-on. After years of refusing the Star interviews, he is now threatening to avoid all media scrums that include any Star reporter and also wants Dale taken off his beat—a request the paper’s management has unsurprisingly refused to grant.

Which brings us to the front on which the two mayors sharply diverge: media relations. Despite his bumbling, off-the-cuff demeanour, there’s little doubt Boris Johnson has hidden polish and an understanding of the press. He has a classics degree from Oxford, an accomplished career history as both a journalist and MP, and an idiosyncratic verbosity. (He once described the Liberal Democrats as “a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition” and Tony Blair as “Harry Houdini crossed with a greased piglet.”) In other words, Johnson is an unapologetic member of the very urban elite that a self-professed “regular guy” like Ford rejects. While educated inner-city liberals may not vote for Johnson en masse, at least he has the advantage of understanding them. Even those Londoners who don’t support Johnson find him entertaining.

Ford, on the other hand, tends to enrage his critics more than he endears himself to them. When it comes to dealing with the media, and by extension “downtown elites,” Ford would be wise to court the enemy the way his London counterpart does: by joking around in a goofy but incessantly human way. Like BoJo, RoFo has a colourful way with words, though his are more to the point. “Every single person said I should have just cooked the guy,” he said of Dale. So far, Ford has lacked the ability to deflect and diffuse with humour—a quality which could go a long way to resurrecting his public image, and which buffoonish and morally suspect politicians have been using to their advantage forever (see Silvio Berlusconi for details).

While the two municipal politicians diverge in their weaknesses (Johnson’s is women; Ford’s is mouthing off), they are united in their charms. As Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson recently wrote of his subject’s victory, “What people really appreciated was his candour. He sounded more honest than most politicians do. The unpopularity of some of the causes he espoused helped to make him sound more principled and gave him ‘authenticity.’” The same words could, and in many ways do, apply to Ford. Whether he’ll ride to a second victory like Johnson is another question entirely. Ford’s path might look similar but you can bet he won’t be on a bike.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/one-bumbles-one-fumbles/feed/6How Leah McLaren nearly crossed the TMI line with the Queenhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/life/how-leah-mclaren-nearly-crosses-the-tmi-line-with-the-queen/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/how-leah-mclaren-nearly-crosses-the-tmi-line-with-the-queen/#commentsFri, 04 May 2012 18:29:38 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=257132The Canadian London correspondent just penned a cover story for the Spectator quite unlike the one she wrote 10 years ago

]]>Leah McLaren just landed on the front page of the Spectator with a tale of how the Queen nearly got an earful from her in response to a regally innocuous and unmistakably British “How do you do?” at a Buckingham Palace reception. The Canadian London correspondent had just found out she was pregnant and had to restrain herself from crossing the “Too Much Information” line with Her Maj.

On the way home she burst into tears.

“I wasn’t crying because of the baby — in fact I was delighted to be pregnant — I was crying because I was having a child with a Englishman who was firmly committed to England. And that meant I could never go home.”

And with this, McLaren has come full circle. For ten years ago, she made waves with another Spectator piece, one tellingly titled: “The tragic ineptitude of the English male.” Back then, she now writes:

“I concluded as a result that most British males were borderline alcoholic, fearful of women, socially and emotionally retarded and, because of the archaic boarding school system (I confined my dating to a small west London sample), probably repressed homosexuals as well.”

Flash forward a decade and McLaren is not only knocked up, but head over heels in love.

“And so, after prematurely dismissing all Englishmen out of hand, I have, to my astonishment, discovered that the best ones can be funny and clever and kind and generally unflappable. Better yet, I have found one with whom I’m very happy to make a life. That he is not boarding school-educated or from what he calls ‘the soft south’ (a place, up until now, I have pretty much thought of as ‘England;’ and a place that Rob, hardly the professional northerner, openly adores) may have something to do with it. To be honest I’m not entirely sure, nor do I really care.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/how-leah-mclaren-nearly-crosses-the-tmi-line-with-the-queen/feed/0Our long limo-related nightmare is overhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/our-long-limo-nightmare-is-over/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/our-long-limo-nightmare-is-over/#commentsThu, 26 Apr 2012 19:57:33 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=255483A note from the office of International Development Minister Bev Oda.On Tuesday, Minister Oda apologised unreservedly in the House. All incremental costs, that should not have been expensed, including …

]]>A note from the office of International Development Minister Bev Oda.

On Tuesday, Minister Oda apologised unreservedly in the House. All incremental costs, that should not have been expensed, including the car service in London, have been repaid.

It is not clear when exactly a The repayment related to the minister’s use of a limousine was made today. The opposition pressed the matter yesterday afternoon.

After the original report on Monday of her luxurious stay in London, the minister’s office said that she had repaid the difference in costs for accommodation and the cancellation fee (at a total of $1,353.81). Canadian Press pegs the car service bill at $3,000.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/our-long-limo-nightmare-is-over/feed/8What does a minister have to do to get a decent glass of orange juice in this city?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-does-a-minister-have-to-do-to-get-a-decent-glass-of-orange-juice-in-this-city/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-does-a-minister-have-to-do-to-get-a-decent-glass-of-orange-juice-in-this-city/#commentsMon, 23 Apr 2012 23:36:35 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=254394For the sake of valuable perspective, Open File figures out how much a posh glass of orange juice would cost in Montreal.
The CBC puts the total amount repaid by…

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-does-a-minister-have-to-do-to-get-a-decent-glass-of-orange-juice-in-this-city/feed/5A glass of orange juice that shall live in infamyhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/a-glass-of-orange-juice-that-shall-live-in-infamy/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/a-glass-of-orange-juice-that-shall-live-in-infamy/#commentsMon, 23 Apr 2012 14:22:16 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=254238If you’re planning a trip to London, International Development Minister Bev Oda has some tips.Oda was originally supposed to stay at the Grange St. Paul’s Hotel, site of the …

]]>If you’re planning a trip to London, International Development Minister Bev Oda has some tips.

Oda was originally supposed to stay at the Grange St. Paul’s Hotel, site of the conference on international immunizations she was attending. Instead, she had staff rebook her into the posh Savoy overlooking the Thames, an old favourite of royalty and currently owned by Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia…

The bill for three nights at the Savoy last June set back taxpayers $1,995, or $665 a night. The government still had to pay for a night at the hotel she rejected, costing an additional $287. An orange juice Oda expensed from the Savoy cost $16.

Today’s math problem: If the government cancelled the F-35 purchase and reallocated that money to the ministerial travel budget, how many more nights at the Savoy could the Harper government afford?

]]>A 44-year-old man who participated in a protest at Western University has been banned from the campus for one year, reports the London Free Press. Mike Roy was protesting an Israel On Campus event at the University Community Centre on Feb. 2 when he and about 25 other demonstrators were asked to leave. The protest, while peaceful, was unauthorized. Roy is a contributor to the campus radio station and has acted as a spokesperson for the Occupy London Movement. He says he was unfairly targeted and has started a petition to have the ban overturned.